


Time for Visions and Revisions, for Taking Toast and Tea.

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Mind Palace, Other, Post-Abominable Bride, interior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 15:25:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5670811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Usually I think of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in association with Mycroft. Sherlock got him this time, though, in response to "The Abominable Bride."</p><p>This is pensive, and dark(ish) and broody. It concludes in some ways with one of my favorite things in the entire episode: Sherlock remembering the silent together-partnership of Lestrade and Mycroft by the graveside, with Sherlock and for Sherlock, but with a relationship that's absolutely them in some way. I love the silent thing those two actors created to be part of one of the most bitterly realistic and perceptive bits of Sherlock's fantasy. There are many truths expressed in that tiny thing, but one of the truths expressed is that Sherlock imagines his brother and his friend/mentor as partners able to communicate in glances and looks, both there for him--but also there for and with each other. </p><p>Meanwhile, Sherlock is working through his feelings about the outcome of his life on the evening following "The Abominable Bride." He's alone in the flat, and working out where his life has come to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time for Visions and Revisions, for Taking Toast and Tea.

Sherlock was lucky. He knew he was. He had John. He had Mary. He had Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, and Molly, and even Janine—maybe. If he worked at it. He stared into the mirror of his bathroom, setting his jaw. Thinking.

Thinking hurt…God, it hurt. He was supposed to be in Eastern Europe right now, preparing for his death, sometime in the next six months. After all, God forbid Mycroft’s estimates prove wrong.

Instead he was back at Baker Street, coming down from his dreams, and his high.

Alone.

He closed his eyes, visions flickering, half memory, half dream. John, scowling as he walked into the old, familiar digs…

“If I look for your stash, is there any chance I’ll find everything?”

“None,” Sherlock had growled. Tired…angry. (Hurt, exhausted...)

“Then you’d better do it yourself,” Mary had said, tart, but unwavering. “If you want something done right…”

“Whatever gave you the impression I wanted it done?”

She met his eyes, and said, “You have a choice, love. Want them—or want us. Sometimes it really is that simple.”

He’d looked away, unsure how to tell her it never was that simple. That he could love her and love John and need them even worse than he needed the drugs—and still, the drugs made the choice for him, sometimes. “You can’t trust me,” he said, coming as close as he could to telling her the truth. “I can’t trust me.”

“Then we’ll do it together,” Mary said. “You’re just going to have to trust us to help.”

It had worked, he supposed. He’d managed to be just clumsy enough to give the serious stashes away, without quite setting off his own defense reactions. Now, barring some weed and a small knob of hash, he had nothing serious to stave off the aching void, the abyss into which he fell, and fell, and fell…

If felt that real. That visceral. Vertigo taking him as he hurtled forward. Aches in his bones.

He was home. He was home, alone.

No, he told himself in angry, bitter determination. Not alone. Mycroft is alone. Again he counted off his tally: the friends he could stack against solitude, the victory he could claim over his damnable brother. John and Mary and Mrs. Hudson and Molly and Janine and Billy Wiggins…He clung to the count. He was not alone. He didn’t have to hang on Mycroft’s sleeve, or define himself by Mycroft’s fucking charity.

He’d had a shower, hot as he could bear, then run a bath that was equally scalding. He’d scrubbed his body from top to toe, trying to scour away the muck-sweat of withdrawal and depression, to scrub away the remaining prison-stink of solitary, scrub away the scent of terror clinging to him from his dreams…

Outside, somewhere, were professional guards. It was a coin-flip whether they were to protect Sherlock, or to ensure he remained in his flat, where Mycroft wanted him. He didn’t have to go to the front windows and look out onto Baker Street and Regent’s Park beyond to look for them. They were there—somewhere. In front, in back. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn there was one down in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen, eating home-baked ginger nuts and slurping sweet white tea.

It was over—all the years of running, of lying, of dodging. There was no further he could run. No more room to hide from John. No more evasions to fool Mary—the nurse and spy. It was no longer just Janine who “knew what kind of man he was.” The cat was out of the bag.

Not that he hadn’t admitted it before, on his own terms, with his own spin. He was Sherlock Holmes, a junkie who solved mysteries as a substitute for drugs. But he’d always put the emphasis on the mysteries, refusing to admit the actual power of the junkie, forever pacing in a padded room one room away from the padded room in his Mind Palace that held Moriarty in chains…

He closed his eyes, and wrapped a bath sheet around himself like a prayer shawl.  He sat on the seat of the toilet, and shivered, the garbage in his body and blood still working its way out of him. He felt battered.

“Welcome to the land of the fallen,” Moriarty whispered within him, gloating. “It’s not the fall that kills you—it’s the landing.”

He was landing. Coming down. Hurtling down and down through withdrawal to the agony of strung-out.

He could feel it.

“Were you high that day?” Moriarty whispered. “Our day? Up on the roof? High in the sky? Were you flying, that day?”

“No,” Sherlock growled.

It was true. Not that he’d been entirely clean in the years before the fall. He’d never been completely honest with John—not since that first night when Lestrade had held the drugs raid and John had attempted to argue that Sherlock could not be, would not be using.

John had learned…or thought he had. He’d learned where Sherlock hid his stashes—at first by accident. In time by intent, as Mycroft enlisted him in the ongoing effort to keep Baby Brother clean.

Sherlock had hated Mycroft for that. His dear brother—forever “there for him” so long as you defined “there” as willing to betray Sherlock on the most personal, humiliating, fundamental levels. Willing to destroy every friendship, willing to drag Sherlock’s weaknesses into the light.

He surged up off the toilet, and stood in front of the mirror over the sink again, scowling. He rummaged in the medicine cabinet. He found the cup with the old-fashioned cake of shaving soap; the straight-edge razor, the long leather strop. He whipped the blade back and forth on the leather, bringing the edge up to the perfect, perfect edge. Then he used the fat brush to whip up foam, and began to shave.

He was a man of a different age. His dream of the Victorian era flicked behind his eyes, and he sank into the sensation of shaving—the scrape of the deadly straight-edge against his throat. He cleaned his neck, his jaw, his cheeks, his upper lip. Clean-shaven, using the archaic, elegant blade—proving every time he shaved that he was not…quite…suicidal. He shaved, therefore he lived.

When he was done he washed the shaving brush, cleaned and stored the razor, wiped off the strop and hung it beside the old pedestal sink. He rinsed his face, and then frowned.

A true Victorian would splash on cologne, he thought, though he himself seldom did. He wandered to the little cupboard at the side of the bathroom and found a box still partially wrapped in elegant gift paper. He dragged out an old gift from Mycroft, that had come one birthday—along with the elegant blue dressing gown. A bottle of a clean, biting pine-scented cologne. A jar of hair product of some sort.

He frowned again. How stupid of Mycroft to think his brother might want anything so quaint and fussy as toiletries. How odd that tonight, still ringing with the memory of the Victorian dream, he did. He brought the kit to the pedestal sink, and set the box on the top of the toilet. He took the tall porcelain bottle of cologne. He opened it, and tipped a small puddle into his palm, smelling the resin and herbal scent rise up. It smelled like pine and sea and wild herbs on the moors: rosemary and lavender and thyme. He rolled the little pool, smelled the rising vapor. He slapped it onto his face and neck, wincing at the sting of alcohol and herbal oils that burned on skin just slightly raw from his shaving.

Mint, he thought, catching yet another layer of scent. All clean smells. All sharp and biting and fresh.

Mycroft, he recalled with sudden anger and love, chose a similarly clean cologne with a light, ringing citrus base: lime and bergamot as the key notes, rather than pine and rosemary. It was sweet.

He remembered waking in the doss house that one day and smelling Mycroft’s cologne, rising so clean and fair. He’d frowned up at his brother’s hurt, frightened face and said, “Athelas,” confusing the herb of healing from the Lord of the Ring with the clean, welcome, dreaded smell of his own brother’s aftershave. “Kingsfoil.” He’d laughed, then—Mycroft only just begun in his role in the civil service, but already too clearly fated to be the foil to so many powers and principalities.

Mycroft had followed the reference. Of course he had. He’d given a choking, injured laugh—undesired laughter, unwelcome. Then swearing he’d gathered Sherlock close and wept.

His tears had dripped into Sherlock’s curls, tickling and stinging his scalp much as the nits did, seeming to creep through Sherlock’s hair. Sherlock, too, had cried, more in anger and loss and defeat than in sorrow, with the healing, hurtful smell of citrus and bergamot surrounding him. Choking him.

That was the day he’d promise to make the list. Not then—later, after his stomach had been pumped and he’d almost died from one mistake in counter-medication.

He’d kept the promise, he thought, reproachfully, looking into his mirror.

“I’m sure he appreciates it daily,” Moriarty murmured. “After all, you’re kind to him in so very many ways.”

“Sod off,” Sherlock growled.

Moriarty’s wise, wicked, vile eyes peered knowingly at him out of Sherlock’s skull. “We hates them, we does, my precious. We hates the little hobbitses, with their nice manners and stupid rules. We hates the day’s eye, that burns us, and the empty land that bites our feet. It was better under the mountain. It was better with our precious to hide in.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sherlock snapped, angry that the comparison was too apt.

“Gollum, Gollum.”

“Bastard.”

Sherlock looked at himself, remembering the Victorian dream. It had been a good dream. He’d felt clever and clean and in control—most of the time. When the drugs and Moriarty and the knowledge of the revelations to come had not twisted the fantasy. He thought of himself—dressed in the trim, figure-flattering coats of the era. Dressed then as Mycroft dressed now, in elegant tailored jackets and a trim waistcoat with a double watch chain making a W across his stomach and the locket with Irene’s image dancing in the center. His face had been long and elegant, and the hair had risen up clean and smooth over his brow, looking adult and…

“Manly,” murmured Moriarty. “Adult.”

He had, he thought. He’d looked manly and adult. Not a little boy in little boy curls. He reached up and fingered his hair, still damp from the shower. He dug in the box of hair product, and found a tube of styling crème. Like the aftershave it smelled of pines and ocean and herbs. Like the shorelands of Sussex, he thought. Heath and pine and sea and sun. He squeezed a bead out and gingerly worked it into his hair, a bit at a time, then attacked it with a comb, working until it lay as neat and prim and exact as his remembered Victorian self. His face below took on a regal air.

He scowled at himself, have entranced, half aware that, just as the Victorian costume, the style echoed Mycroft’s.

“I’ll always be there for you,” Moriarty squealed, mocking and girlish and twee. “I’ll always be there for you.” He scoffed, then. “He may be—but I’ll be there for you first. I’ll be with you and by you and in you. I’ll even be you, if you like. You don’t need him. You’re not alone. You’re never alone. He’s the freak.”

Mycroft was the freak, he thought, remembering his brother in the first year of their schooling. For years he’d thought of Mycroft as his leader, his elder, his god. And then they’d stepped into the real world, and discovered they were both freaks…but Mycroft was the bigger freak.

For one burning second Sherlock could imagine his brother once more a twelve-year-old, the day before they started school, assuring his baby brother that it would all be a marvelous adventure. He remembered the excitement in the shy, quiet face, and the flame of anticipation in Mycroft’s eyes.

By the next day his brother had a black eye and a missing tooth and quiet and shyness had been replaced with icy control and reserve.

Sherlock had hoped to avoid that. He’d tried for years, working to fit in and failing, watching his brother disappear into the man who survived. In the end he hadn’t seen his big brother again until the day at the doss house, crying.

Tears like lice, he thought, grimacing. Hands clinging tight. Disgusting.

And from that day on he’d had so much power, so much of the moral high ground, so profoundly obnoxious a sense of his own responsibility and his own fault.

“It’s not about you,” Sherlock muttered, running his hands over the neat new hair style. “Can’t you even give me credit for sinning my own damned sins?”

He straightened and veered, careening out into the empty flat. Before him he saw ghost of John, of Mary. Behind him, in the bathroom, he heard Janine, giggling.

He could remember what it felt like to sleep beside her, legs tangled in hers. She wore cologne of her own, just as Mary wore Claire de la Lune. He didn’t like her perfume, though—liked better when she smelled fresh and clean, of soap and woman. He could close his eyes and recall the scent of the turn of her neck, a little sweet, a little musky. Different parts of her had different smells, a truth he’d never really considered, even after Irene had introduced him to sex. He’d indulged in each scent, even as he’d withheld actual intercourse. He’d kissed and caressed and undressed her and delighted her.

“So easy to betray.”

“Sod off, I said.”

Moriarty sniffed. “Betrayal is the new sexy.”

“Not everything can be the new sexy.”

“Sexy is the new sexy.”

“Sod off.”

He rummaged in his wardrobe and dresser, looking for clothes that seemed to match the sleek new face and its helmet of hair—the high brow, the lean lines. He found a black shirt and a charcoal shawl-necked sweater John had once given him for Christmas, and trousers black as jet and trim lace-up shoes. He looked at himself and felt a sudden longing for a pirate’s gold hoop or a burning ruby to break the elegant darkness.

“Vanity, thy name is Sherlock.”

He didn’t bother even telling Moriarty to bugger off. The man was only a memory, now—a fever haze. A dream.

“An undigested bit of beef? A blot of mustard? A crumb of cheese? Or maybe a fragment of an underdone potato.” Moriarty sounded too smug.

“You’re dead. It is sufficient grounds to be done with you.” Sherlock went to the kitchen, then, and made a pot of tea, regretting the lack of milk and the lack of John to go fetch milk for him. In the end he ran downstairs and borrowed a cup from Mrs. Hudson, who wept a little that he was back, and suggested that his new hairstyle made him look….elegant. Old, mind you, but elegant… He thanked her, more for the milk than the questionable fashion sense, and retreated back up to his own flat, where he curled uneasily in his chair, with the fire burning, and drank his tea alone.

I am not alone, he told himself, and again recited the litany of friends. John and Mary and Mrs. Hudson and Molly and Janine and Billy Wiggins and perhaps even Anderson, poor idiot though he might be.

He closed his eyes, then, and steepled his fingers, and ignored the ache and longing in every fiber of his being for new drugs, or old times. For John in his chair, for Mary laughing at the desk and planning out the wedding. For Janine coiled in his bed, wearing one of his shirts, reading a silly book on her silly eReader. For the days when he’d still been able to pretend he was in control.

He drifted into dream, easily, effortlessly, imagining John and Mary curled together in John’s armchair, Mary on her husband’s lap. Janine sat in Sherlock’s own chair, chattering to Mary, her soothing Irish accent warming the room as much as the fire in the fireplace. Irene lounged languidly, curled on the hearth rug, Sherlock’s burgundy dressing gown wrapped around her and pooling over her long legs. She shot Janine a wicked, amused glance, then winked at Sherlock and nodded, approving.

He, standing by the window playing his violin, smiled and nodded back, then looked out the front window and down to the street below, where two figures stood, both watching the Baker Street flat.

Lestrade leaned lazily against the masonry of the building opposite, his arms crossed, his body relaxed but alert. Beside him stood Mycroft, tidy in his trim Crombie overcoat. They kept their distance, a few feet separating them.

It pierced Sherlock to the heart. The ghosts of John and Mary faded; Irene was gone; Janine lost to silence and the dark of the flat as evening fell. Sherlock standing in the window, saw the men and knew them—as he’d known the at the graveside, in dream.

Together, he thought. Together in simple, silent trust. Never a word exchanged. Never a sentence needed. They’d had entire conversations in a single glance, made choices for Sherlock’s well-being in the cock of a head, the lift of a brow, the quirk of a lip.

Now he knew why he had not added them to his tally. What they had was real, though he dreamed it. Over ten years of partnership, unstated and unacknowledged, but real and firm in a way that, tonight, he wasn’t even sure his relationship with John and Mary could ever be.

He scowled, admitting to himself that he’d dreamed them apart in his Victorian dream. Dreamed them smaller and less worthy than they were in truth. Dreamed them as laughable puppets. Mocked them in his inner fantasy. Mycroft big as a house—but whispering at the Meaning of Life. Lestrade, blond and foolish and quaint.

But the dream of the grave had told the truth. When everyone else was gone, when even John walked away, they were there, begging him to be his better self, but permitting him the freedom of his own failures.

If he dug himself a grave, they would walk to it with him—and cry when the earth was shoveled back over him. But they’d cry together.

“I’ll always be there for you,” Mycroft said. Lestrade, standing at his shoulder, nodded, silent but certain.

It wasn’t want Sherlock wanted.

But he nodded, unable to ignore the dignity of their mutual trust—and their dedication to him.

They were good guardians, he thought—so good they would not steal his choices, even if those choices were bad.

He loved them. He hated them. Oh, god, he envied their partnership, whatever it was, however deep it ran.

He blinked his eyes, and the men in Baker Street were gone.

“I’ll always be here for you,” Moriarty whispered.

“I very much fear he will,” Mycroft whispered in response.

“Never mind, lad,” Lestrade said, pulling Sherlock in for a fast hug. “You’re a right bastard, but you’re our bastard. Let the sodding git go, and we’ll all be here for you.”

Lestrade held Sherlock—but somehow, in some invisible way, he and Mycroft embraced, too—faithful, eternal, patient, joined.

“I am alone,” Sherlock said, waking to cooling tea and a body weary to the bone.

“Never,” the voices of his dreams whispered back…and he didn’t know whose voices were loudest, but he knew which two he envied most...eternal in their faithfulness…

 


End file.
